General

As an artist, curator, and artistic director, Kristy Edmunds has headed up theater organizations starting in Portland, Oregon, then Melbourne, Australia, and then at the Armory at New York City, all those programs, when Kristy Edmunds left, had been revolutionized. One piece written about her is titled HOW KRISTY EDMUNDS HAS SHAKEN UP CONTEMPORARY ART!

AT UCLA since the 2012-13 season, she’s created seasons like none other in Los Angeles. Where our respected institutions present productions that mostly are tried and true, with commercial success in mind, the seasons offered by UCLA at The Center of the Art of Performance, or CAP, is an explosion of originality and creativity. Some presentations are by well-known artists in a range of categories from theater, to dance, to music, to spoken word, and some are the product of years of Kristy working with artists she discovers. As she says about what she presents, “Artists disrupt our conscious and unconscious tendency to feel complacent about any number of things going on in society writ large…the organization that I run has to work within the same spirit of acting from the position of integrity, compassion, and the usefulness of disruption.”

Being as much a creator of performances as she is someone who books them, as well as being the shepherd of a large flock of donors where the warmth of her engaging personality makes us all feel like we are her friend, she also is a marvel in the talks she delivers to audiences before many of the performances. She settles people in, letting them know the value of the arts in general and readying them for whatever they need to know about what they are about to see.

This spring she was named the inaugural recipient of the Berresford Prize, a $25,000 annual award, founded by United States Artists, to honor a cultural practitioner who has significantly contributed to the advancement, wellbeing and care of artists in society. Kristy got it “for her work as a thoughtful and groundbreaking cultural producer and advocate for artists.”

When Wild Wild Country came out as a documentary series on Netflix and made a huge splash, I made a little YouTube video about being flown to Rajneeshpuram when they were recruiting me to be a follower:

Hello Hollywood! This got me discovered by Ideapod’s CEO, Justin Brown, who invited me to do the webinar with him that’s below.

(I am a big supporter of Ideapod, a rare site that, like mine, invites participation to come up with what can help this crazed world, and I urge you to become an Ideapod member.)

By now you’ve probably heard of the Wild Wild Country documentary series that premiered on Netflix on March 16th.

It tells the incredible story of the Indian spiritual master, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho, who founded a commune, Rajneeshpuram, in rural Oregon in the early 1980s. Remarkably, the commune attracted thousands of people from around the world inspired by the promise of a new kind of society.

The movement also drew controversy and fell apart when significant figures from the commune ending up being charged with terrorism and jailed for immigration fraud and attempted murder.

Pennell and Hasya

The documentary series is entertaining to watch. However, there is very little exploration of Osho’s teaching that caused so many people to come together to create a new way of living. It was a revolutionary project and the residents seemed to sincerely hope their ways of thinking would spread around the world. We therefore decided to talk with two people who knew a lot about that era.The full video is below, along with a transcript (Click here for the transcript that’s in what Ideapod sent…ST.) Our hope is that others will be able to take the discussion further by building upon the ideas discussed here.Wild Wild Country is truly stunning. Yet, while watching the documentary series I couldn’t help but think that it didn’t do justice to the many thousands of people who moved to Oregon to create a new way of living.

I then came across a beautiful short video by Suzanne Taylor from Sue Speaks. She had visited the commune and expressed an opinion about the lack of focus on Osho’s teachings in the documentary series. I reached out to Suzanne to discuss this issue, and she invited Pennell Rock into the discussion. Pennell was a disciple of Osho’s. He visited Oregon often but lived there for only three months. Prior to Osho’s sojourn in the States, Pennell lived intermittently at his Ashram in India and brought his girlfriend there. She became Hasya, who plays a major part in the documentary as she became Osho’s right hand when Sheela, who was running the place, fled from Oregon. Pennell is a scholar in Comparative Religions and Philosophy, so he was the perfect person to join us for this discussion.

I find it helpful to think about the meaning of life and what I am doing here. The deeper I understand the point of life, the smarter I can be about how to live. One of the things I keep asking myself is what it would take for me to feel content, let alone happy. But, content will do — to create equilibrium to think and to choose my actions intelligently.

I’m with Socrates saying the unexamined life is not worth living. Ever since the human potential movement pushed me beyond where being a wife and mom was the main frame for my life, I’ve thought about what the basics are that I need for my well-being.

I think that’s a good topic to talk about. We get food for thought from one another. And, since engagement is what this site is here to serve, how about telling me what you need to keep you going? Would you do a little introspection and see what you come up with? Maybe we can inspire one another to more profound insights that lead us to more satisfying choices!

A while ago, I settled into being creative and being appreciated as my bottom lines. Lately, I’ve been thinking that has morphed to having a good game to play, which covers both those bases.

There are two quotes that, together, frame that game perspective in a way that gives me guidance:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

We’re not here forever. We enter at birth with an allotment of so many years to play out our drama. We get what we get and we have to figure out what to do with it.

I am informed about that by this quote that’s at the start of a book by a lesser-known sage:

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity – play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word “engagement.” Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked “NO EXIT,” yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.― Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness

Here’s a bonus from that wonderful de Ropp book:

To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates.

And I happened to come across this comment on de Ropp’s book that I agree with:

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK TO READ WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG. ACTUALLY, THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK TO READ ANYTIME YOUNG OR OLD. AND IT IS CERTAINLY WORTH A RE-READING. ALTHOUGH WRITTEN IN THE 60s IT IS JUST AS RELEVANT NOW AS THEN.

What are your essentials for staying positive? What keeps you moving forward everyday?

Can we pass an amendment to the Constitution so Richard Branson can be President? What he says at the end of remarks about how businesses should treat employees, when he’s asked, What do you think those in positions of power should do to address social problems like income inequality?, is THE succinct pinpointing of where we are stuck. A world run by profit is not a world that works for the good of people. What he just mentions in passing to conclude the interview should have flashing neon lights all around it to draw the public’s attention to the bottleneck that is preventing our next evolutionary step. How to get over this HUGE hump? I was heartened to see how cogently he talks about a Basic Income Guarantee, a track I’ve been on since before we were even talking about this in the States, and was even more heartened when he went beyond that specific idea to urge businesses to become responsible change agents rather than narrow-minded profit seekers.

David: What do you think those in positions of power should do to address social problems like income inequality?

Richard: A basic income should be introduced in Europe and in America. It’s great to see countries like Finland experimenting with it in certain cities. It’s a disgrace to see people sleeping on the streets with this material wealth all around them. And I think with artificial intelligence coming along, there needs to be a basic income.

David: Because of job displacement?

Richard: I think A.I. will result in there being less hours in the day that people are going to need to work. You know, three-day workweeks and four-day weekends. Then we’re going to need companies trying to entertain people during those four days, and help people make sure that they’re paid a decent amount of money for much shorter work time.

David: That’s a pretty rosy vision of what business can do. Is it really so simple?

Holly: If all businesses start doing the right thing for their communities and the world as a whole, all of the world’s problems could be solved.

Richard: If we can get every business in the world to adopt a global problem, get slightly smaller businesses to adopt a national problem, get smaller businesses still to adopt local problems, then we can get on top of pretty well every problem in the world.

My father was a first generation American, born to Russian immigrants, and, although he became a bigtime lawyer (he was President of his Bar Association and they closed all the courthouses in Nassau County, Long Island, for half a day in his honor when he died), he and my mother were more intent on making a success of his practice than on paying attention to the arts. I learned about being chic from a couple of years I spent working for Horst P. Horst, a Vogue photographer, booking the models and scouring New York antique stores for Faberge boxes and the like to put in his ravishing pictures. He’s one of the photographers featured in a show that’s at Los Angeles’s Getty Museum now, that’s written up on the front page of yesterday’s Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, with this picture of Horst’s included in the article. They say that “the bastard stepchild of the fine art world is finally getting its birthright,” in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011.

This particular picture has a special story about it, where Madonna recreated this Mainbocher Corset of 1939 in her video for Vogue, an iconic song from her, I’m Breathless album. For more about the wonder that Horst was, click here.

“Iconic is one of those words much overused in fashion. Like luxury, or genius. But they’re all applicable – honestly – to the work of Horst P Horst.

“Sculptural is an appellation applied to his photography, his use of light and shade to transform fabric and the human form alike into monoliths reminiscent of classical sculpture.”

“In the 1960s and ’70s, photographer Horst and writer Valentine Lawford were the world’s preeminent aesthetic power couple, celebrating the chic lives of society’s most glorious swans and turning lifestyle journalism into a modern art form.” Click here for more.

“For thousands of years those of Ra have sought to teach the Law of One to seekers of truth on Earth who wished to learn of the unity or oneness of all things. Through this contact, Ra shared information to help seekers of truth deepen their awareness and acceptance of self and other, and to help Earth move into the emerging fourth density of love and understanding.” – The Ra Contact: Teaching the Law of One

For all true seekers, who want to see all the way to origin to understand our place in the scheme of things, this is a body of material not to miss. There are different flavors, if you will, of the same truth of being, and this is one of them. Who knows where that deep knowledge that can guide us comes from? Somehow, there are openings here on earth for it to get in. Mystics and saints through the ages have been doorways. In religions, there are doorways to be found. It matters not whether you have an opinion about channeling, which is where this body of truth came from. It has that same resonance and that’s all that matters. It’s what occurs within you when you’re on one of the authentic paths. Your own awareness is your authority, and those who have had these experiences know that.

If you don’t recognize this, I wish you the understanding that is yet to come. Exposing yourself to documents like this won’t convince you, but, from what starts as an intellectual exercise to take in information can be rewarded many times over from the access that gives to the bigger reality.

On a personal note, I had been a longtime fan of communications delivered as the Law of One, when, in 2,010, I saw that Carla Rueckert, the channel, was on a conference bill in Hawaii. My documentary, What on Earth?, was newly out, so, to be a fellow presenter with Carla, I gave them my film for a screening. Carla, who left us in 2015, was very special. She was so connected to a larger force while at the same time she was so down to earth. I liked her very very much. And, she liked me.

Like SUE on Facebook

In this new podcast, Kristy Edmunds, Executive and Artistic Director of The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) gives us a glimpse at some of the outstanding programs for the upcoming 2109- 20 season. Check out the teaser for this podcast episode! SUESpeaks.org/podcast ...

Follow SUE on Twitter

In this new #podcast, Kristy Edmunds, Executive & Artistic Director of The Center for the Art of
#Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) gives us a glimpse at some of the outstanding programs for the upcoming 2109- 20 season. Check out the teaser: https://t.co/9W2JX2r5vi
#performingarts

SUESpeaks.org is the website for Mighty Companions.Inc., a non-profit which produces events and projects devoted to shifting mass consciousness to where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves.

Mighty Companions is a non-profit corporation and all donations are tax-deductible